EOS 1000D and Nikon D700 in hand

[David Kilpatrick]

Since a lot of the people I know buying the D3 were buying two bodies, some may just buy the D700 if it is available, then buy a D3 later only if they feel they need it. These are mostly my professional readers of Master Photo Digital, and if they don't buy bodies in pairs, they always have two or three cameras to hand especially when covering weddings. Some also have two photographers to hand, with more than one body each in use, and spares in case of disaster.

The main reason these pros have been buying the D3 is the dual card slot. David Bryce, who just got one body so far, has 16GB cards in both slots and shoots raw only. He duplicates the file on both cards (one of the options). It is just a security issue. He's being paid £2500 to cover a wedding typically, and wants to be 100 per cent sure of never losing an image. The D700 will not appeal to those who want RAW+RAW dual card backup, or the equally common RAW on one card, top quality JPEG on the other card. It only has one card slot.

This is a trick which Sony missed with the Alpha 700. Had they enabled the MemoryStick Duo Pro slot to record duplicate files or to split RAW+JPEG, many professionals would have been interested in the system. I can see real merit in having a 16GB MSDuoPro loaded just to save JPEGs of everything while you swap successibe CF cards to shoot raw. But they did not enable parallel writing to both slots.

David

[Javelin]

That is a nice feature. I wouln't have enough use for it mind you, But boy thats a lot of data to sling around in such a short time and must be through seperate controllers too to write that so quickly and also must double the buffer space required. no wonder that camera is so expensive.